If ads weren't riddled with malware or absolutely obnoxious...
Browsing without an ad blocker is cancer
Hey, remember when you could see more than a single line of text of an article on mobile? Me neither.
Hey motherfucker, did you know you can go AD FREE with YouTube™ premium? Look, it's P R E M I U M. and it will only cost you $9.99 a month (plus any data we choose to siphon from you, aaaaaaand you have to be subjected to our shit-ass suggestions that you will almost certainly not be interested in, because fuck you in your stupid content sucking mouth)
I'll be that guy and say this isn't crappy design and shouldn't be in this community. We've already got posts filling top of all we don't need more where they don't belong.
yeah, this is a policy OP doesn't like, not bad design
Ads are crappy by design. I think the spirit of the community is upheld with this post.
I would argue that pop-ups like this are an intentionally crappy design meant to be frustrating and get in the way. But, I understand what your saying, this is perhaps not the best suited community for this post.
Thankfully it isn't hard to remove with ublock origin. Just enter Element picker mode and select the pop up to remove it. Then do the same for the greyed out background & it'll work normally.
Yeah, I got no issue with removing it, but it's still agrivating to see even once.
I've paid for YouTube premium pretty much since it started being a thing and had to drop it recently for financial reasons. Simply existing these days feels like I'm drowning. The bombardment of ads and frequent notifications to come back are making me want to ditch YouTube entirely. I've been using YouTube in Firefox with desktop site requested to play my videos in the background and I try to use odysee as much as possible now. Their price hikes along with no recognition of how long I've been a paying member has really gotten to me.
This is less "crappy design" and more "asshole design"
What's the reason why you think this is an asshole design? I can think of two:
Advertisements in of itself is a blight on humanity
They have a dominant market position and it's almost impossible to compete.
But, these two things aside?
I'm not the one you responded to, but I'll say why I think it's an asshole design:
Then there's the fact that virtually every video requires ads before you view it, when you might only need to see 10s of the video to know that it's not relevant. Putting multiple ads before you're allowed to see those 10 seconds is an asshole move. Then there's the sheer quantity of ads. The last time I tried to watch a few music videos without an ad blocker I think it was at least 25% ad time.
Removing the ability to skip is also a major asshole move. The whole justification for skippable ads was that consumers wouldn't skip ads that were good and relevant. If the advertiser was doing their job and making good ads, and YouTube was doing a good job and finding the right audience for those ads, then in theory the ads wouldn't be skipped. If an advertiser was upset that users were skipping ads, YouTube could push back and say that either their ad sucked, or that they had mistargeted the ad. Now they seem to be admitting that their ad targeting is bullshit, or that they don't care if the ad isn't relevant to the user, the user has to watch it regardless.
But, most of this hinges on the enshittification happening once the platform has become a monopoly. If YouTube only had a 20% market share, asshole moves would push people to competitors. But, the key thing is that they lost money or barely broke even until all their competitors had folded, and then they started making things worse.
/r/assholedesign refers to user hostile design. Ads are generally unwanted and def unwanted if the person has an ad blocker. Putting a nag pop up is inherently user hostile.
But, these two things aside?
There's definitely more but why are you implying these two things aren't enough?
I use Firefox and have uBlock Origin installed. I block ALL cookies from YouTube and Google and other Google sites. I am not signed into any Google properties and I have not seen an ad for over 10+years. I never use an app or mobile and use only a desktop on Linux.
Google will not win over products like uBlock Origin because, it's NOT an ad blocker, it's an element blocker. It allows the user to remove annoyances, and that sometimes includes ads.
The only way Google will get to force ads on people is if they REQUIRE you to sign in to it's services and force cookies on you. It will have to be a walled garden. Meta, Xitter, bluesky, reddit, will all eventually go to the walled garden because they are greedy. Users will leave and the Fediverse will grow.
People are fed up with ads and all the "improvements" that sites like YouTube make. Ambient mode, auto play, end cards, notations, all unnecessary. And we block it with element blockers.
I don't think the Fediverse can really provide an alternative to YouTube. The infrastructure required for the amount of data constantly being served and processed is prohibitly expensive.
Maybe not today, and never at the scale that YouTube is right now (that's not a bad thing), but never say never.
5 years ago no one saw a psychopath buying and actively destroying Xitter.
Technology changes quickly. It won't be long until 10TB HDDs are standard fare, 8G is everywhere, electric cars are 40% of the market etc.
Anything is a possibility and humans get smarter and more innovative. I know this because humans can carry a small computer in their pockets.
Are you saying that it costs a lot of money to setup a video streaming service that stores terrabytes of data? From what I hear that should all just be free!
I have yet to get this. Everybody's talking about it.
Am I the chosen one?
They're slowly rolling it out to all users. It's not yet a full deployment.
I'm somewhat surprised it took so long after they took over YouTube.
Might cause some surprising competition hopefully
Who is going to be competing for the eyeballs of people who militantly refuse to watch ads? I'd love to see YouTube have competition, but I don't think the demographic here is particularly valuable to anyone.
Yeah, I feel like this is all very cyclical.
The status quo is acceptable so people use it. It works well enough and it's practical enough that the majority of the user base sticks with a given standard, which creates momentum/inertia: the more accepted a given platform becomes the more content creators cater to it, which in turn draws and keeps more traffic.
Owners of the platform see this and monetize. It's not bad at first but eventually greed gets the better of everyone, and they keep pushing and squeezing, usually both the base and the creators, for the privilege of playing in their playground, the defacto "place to be"... without consideration of the fact that their playground only holds that status because of the very people they're squeezing.
Eventually they push it too far, and people start to jump ship as the enshittification finally tips their scales away from the status quo and makes finding an alternative the more attractive choice, even if it means giving up the positive aspects of the established platform.
Sometimes it can take a while but eventually one or more new platforms emerge as the new "place to be" and the cycle begins again.
Unfortunately, rather than learning from past mistakes and simply being less greedy and understanding that they need to find ways of generating profit that doesn't alienate their creators and viewers, instead the lesson learned seems to be 'try to find ways to trap users in your system so they can't leave'...which never is going to work.
If they manage to kill ReVanced I'm done with YouTube. I'll subscribe to Nebula or something.
Use Invidious! No ads, no username required, no reporting to YouTube, Sponsorblock can be used, and you still get unlimited access to YouTube's content. There are dozens of instances, but inv.tux pizza usually works for me.
I know that Nebula has exclusive infotainment, but sometimes I just want to watch people be bad at video games.
I feel like this might be blasphemous around here, but I actually like being logged in and getting tailored algorithmic suggestions on YouTube. Unlike most people it seems to know my interests pretty well.
Everyone needs to sign out on desktop if you’re using Ublock origin bypass. This whole TOS thing could be grounds to start going after your account they don’t achieve the outcome they’re looking for
Then I'll just make another account . . . with blackjack and hookers.
This is a long time coming. Who in their right mind thought that a service that allows pretty much anyone to upload gigabytes of videos would be free forever. I get that people don't like ads, but the amount of outrage is overkill.
Don't care, there are billions of hours lifetime saved by adblocking.
Nobody needs to defend this tech conglomerates, let them figure it out.
It’s less about not liking ads and more that the ads are plagued with scams, spam and whatever else.
Don’t we think that they should be held accountable for the type of ads they run on there? Crypto scams, get rich quick, and mlms to name a few.
The same goes for the MSN homepage it’s fucking ridiculous.
Also, if they want to serve me ads, then stop selling my data too. If I sign up for premium they’ll still sell your data anyway.
I am not really in a place where I would want to defend billion dollar companies.
I can only speak for myself, but it’s less about the monetizing and more about the how.
The ads are intrusive and highly disrespectful of our time. Not to mention the bullcrap they’re allowed to advertise that would get videos demonetized. And the risk of malware from the ads.
I can understand things like premium. Heck if they wanted to lock HD behind premium I could understand. It costs a lot of money to run that crap so getting money for that service does make sense.
But by solving that with intrusive, annoying, possibly dangerous ads? I will block the ads. Find a better way because that ain’t it. I will sooner leave YouTube for other video sites satisfying my interests that are currently being advertised by creators on YouTube itself, than accept the crappy ads.
This is when you're supposed to use the FOSS alternatives
Me personally because I don't have a Google account nor saw a real gain in getting one (for what I do in my day to day), I just switched to these for subscriptions.
Me personally, I didn't mind ads back in the day when they weren't so annoying. But somehow YouTube + content creators made ads so annoying at some point that I started to use ad blocker and sponsor skipper.
My theory is that by becoming so aggressive with ads , YouTube income / video actuallly decreased due to people getting fed up with ads and getting ad blockers. Now they go even more aggressive so people will start to look for alternatives.
It'll be interesting to see following development.
Firefox + LibRedirect add-on + FreeTube
I saw this, hit the X to close that pop-up and continued on as usual. Just me?
You know what annoys me the most about this?
I looked up the price of Premium. It's not great but not too bad either. I hate subscription services so I thought "I'll just buy the annual plan"
Google doesn't offer the Family Annual plan in my region. Only Individual Annual.
Fucks sake Google! If I'm trying to give you money, the least you could have done is make it easy!
They really think this will work, don't they?
If you're using an ad blocker, they don't want your business anyway.
It sadly probably will. At least for the majority of users that either don't know or can't be bothered to circumvent it.
Noticed that theres no equivalent to r/crappydesign here yet so i made one
